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Time Machine, The 12
curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the Sun.
`I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity of my voyage came suddenly upon me.
What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and
had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some
old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness--a foul creature to
be incontinently slain.
`Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricate parapets and tall columns, with a wooded
hill-side dimly creeping in upon me through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned
frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I did so the shafts of the sun smote through
the thunderstorm. The grey downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a ghost.
Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness.
The great buildings about me stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm, and
picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt
as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My fear grew to
frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It
gave under my desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One hand on the saddle, the other
on the lever, I stood panting heavily in attitude to mount again.
`But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I looked more curiously and less fearfully
at this world of the remote future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house, I saw a group
of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and their faces were directed towards me.
`Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the White Sphinx were the heads and
shoulders of men running. One of these emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I
stood with my machine. He was a slight creature--perhaps four feet high--clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the
waist with a leather belt. Sandals or buskins--I could not clearly distinguish which--were on his feet; his legs
were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.
`He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His flushed face
reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive--that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much.
At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my hands from the machine.
IV
`In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up
to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at once. Then he
turned to the two others who were following him and spoke to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid
tongue.
`There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight or ten of these exquisite creatures
were about me. One of them addressed me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh
and deep for them. So I shook my head, and, pointing to my ears, shook it again. He came a step forward,
hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They
wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all alarming. Indeed, there was something in
these pretty little people that inspired confidence--a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease. And besides,
they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine-pins. But I
made a sudden motion to warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the Time Machine. Happily
then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the
machine I unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these in my pocket. Then I turned